of thirty years of feminist art history. In her 1994 essay "Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History," Nochlin reflected on her awakening as a feminist and its impact on her scholarship and teaching: "In 1969, three major events occurred in my life: I had a baby, I became a feminist, and I organized the first class in Women and Art at Vassar College." Nochlin deconstructed art history by identifying and questioning methodological presuppositions. She was an advocate for "art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit." Orientalism Following Edward Said's influential 1978 book, Orientalism, Nochlin was one of the first art historians to apply theories of Orientalism to the study of art history, specifically in her 1983 paper, "The Imaginary Orient." Her key assertion was that Orientalism must be seen from the point-of-view of 'the particular power structure in which these works came into being," in this case, 19th century French colonialism. Nochlin focused primarily on the 19th century French artists Jean-Leon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix, who both depicted 'orientalist' themes in their work, including, respectively, The Snake Charmer and The Death of Sardanapalus. In Gérôme's "The Snake Charmer," from the late 1860s, Nochlin described how Gérôme created a sense of verisimilitude not only in his rendering of the scene with such realistic precision one almost forgets a painter painted it, but in capturing the most minute details, such as meticulously painted tiles. As a result, the painting appears to be documentary evidence of life in the Ottoman court while, according to Nochlin, it is in fact a Westerner's vision of a mysterious world. In Delacroix's "The Death of Sardanapalus" from 1827, Nochlin argued that the artist used Orientalism to explore overt erotic and violent themes that may not necessarily reflect France's cultural hegemony but rather the chauvinism and misogyny of early 19th century French society. Representing Women In "Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian," which is the introduction to Nochlin's book of essays Representing Women, Nochlin examines the representation of women in nineteenth-century art and the ways in which the ad hoc methodology is at play, as she writes, "What I am questioning is the possibility of a single methodology—empirical, theoretical, or both, or neither—which is guaranteed to work in every case, a kind of methodological Vaseline which lubricates an